The Days Of The Body-Snatchers...

If the body-snatchers didn't get you, the vampires might have done...

There was a time you see when the laws began to relax a little and not so many people were sentenced to die on the gallows...which was grand for them, but not so good for trainee surgeons. Almost considered to be part of the punishment was the fact that the bodies of criminals were handed over to the growing number of Schools of Anatomy for dissection.

With no efficient means of refrigeration to keep the cadavers fresh, the schools needed a constant supply of fresh bodies for the students...so along came the Resurrection Men to fill the demand.

They dug up freshly buried people and took them under cover of darkness to the various Anatomy Schools where they were paid well...the going rate at the height of the body-snatching period was about twelve shillings for each body. Each student paid a shilling to watch demonstrations so the surgeon teacher was never out of pocket...there were always more students than places available.

The early Victorians were already terrified of being buried alive and had devised various methods of alerting the Watchmen in the graveyards to rescue them should that happen to them... tied with string... hung on stakes which went through a hole in the coffin lid and was tied to your big toe...should you have woken up and wanted to get out...you waggled your toe...the bell rang...and I would think most Night Watchmen would have run home as fast as they could but they were supposed to unearth you and let you out.

Now they had the added worry of being dug up...sometimes the family would keep vigil for several days by which time you'd be worthless to the surgeons...others laid heavy slabs of stone on top of the coffin itself...some erected iron cages which completely enclosed the area around the grave...for the more wealthy, there was the family vault.

The huge cemetery in Dublin...Glasnevin...has two watch towers looking out over the acres of land ...they were used by the Night Watchmen who were heavily armed with rifles...the grounds themselves were constantly patrolled by armed guards.

As body-snatching became more perilous for the people who carried it out, so the surgeons were less than scrupulous about where the corpses came from...it became a little too easy for the snatchers to bang a tramp on the head or entice a prostitute down a dark alley to strangle her...

The most infamous Body-Snatchers were Burke and Hare of course...two nasty men who didn't bother with digging into new graves when it was easier for them to murder a person and pass them off as a 'newly buried corpse'...they weren't really Body-Snatchers as much as plain murderers...

Eventually all the shenanigans came to a head...an Act was passed which gave people the choice of leaving their body for medical research if they so wished...much to Parliaments surprise there were very many who chose to do so and the days of the Body-Snatchers came to an end.

[redted]

I enjoyed reading all that,very interesting,but would not want to live in that era,unless I was wealthy.

[Hidden]

I wonder if they ever came across someone who had been buried alive? We will never know as they would have been promply killed properly this time! x

[Nikkers in reply to Hidden]

Yes they did Coughalot! That's why we still have a "Wake". Way back when, people drunk more than was good for them and it was served in lead lined drinking vessels Too much of this caused the person to fall over and appear as if dead (hence the saying " dead drunk".) Several (how many is not known) were buried alive, and this is what lead to the wake - leaving the body for a few days to see if they (a)wake? It also partly , as Vashti says, why they added a bell to the coffin.

There are several accounts also of people being "reawakened" by body snatchers who were trying to remove jewellery -especially by cutting rings from their fingers. One wealthy woman that this happened to, awoke and walked home in her shroud, knocked on the door and the maid who answered dropped dead with shock!